With today's crowded airspace and demanding timelines, the safe and efficient operation of aircraft presents many challenges. To address those challenges, manufacturers have designed modern aircraft to rely on an increasingly sophisticated collection of embedded electronics assemblies to assist in flight management, aircraft operation, and navigation. However, to ensure accuracy of terrain data and quality of software, many of these embedded electronics assemblies, often referred to as Line Replaceable Units (or LRUs), must undergo periodic maintenance through data upload or software upgrade.
Originally, airline maintenance personnel upgraded flight management computers by using an ARINC standard 603 portable tape upload device, but such tape loaders were clumsy and slow. Manufacturers then progressed to data loading computers that were based on ARINC standard 615 (Data Loader standard), which is in essence a software protocol layered onto an ARINC standard 429 data bus. ARINC 615 data loaders abandoned the tape format of ARINC 603 in favor of a 3.5-inch floppy diskette medium for transferring data and software.
Many airlines today provide data or software updates to their aircraft by connecting an ARINC Standard 615-compliant portable data loader to the LRUs in their aircraft, or by feeding floppy diskettes to an ARINC 615-compliant airborne data loader built into the aircraft. The software or data for these updates has grown increasingly more complex as the systems in aircraft provide more functionality to the cockpit crew and traffic control.
The high cost of creating software is a well-established fact. Likewise, it is well known that the ease of copying software presents a significant risk factor in software vendors' ability to recover their investments in the development of sophisticated software applications and databases. Further complicating the matter, since special-purpose software has a smaller consumer base than general-purpose software, the development costs must be amortized over fewer products. As a result, the price for special purpose software is often much higher per installation than general purpose software such as a personal computer operating system, and in some cases may be more than an order of magnitude more expensive. However, the higher price of the software also increases the likelihood of unauthorized copying or distribution. With the high opportunity cost of losing sales to piracy, software vendors face a difficult challenge in recovering their investment and continuing to remain profitable.
One shortcoming in prior art techniques for aviation software upgrades is the inability to specify a specific piece of flight hardware that the aircraft customer is authorized to upgrade. Another shortcoming in prior art techniques is the inability to limit the customer-performed software or data upgrades to a finite number of installations. Yet another shortcoming in prior art techniques is the ability for the customer to specify a limited number of software installation targets based on a pre-authorized number of installations. What is needed then, is a method for software vendors to prevent piracy of their products while allowing customers the flexibility to continue to perform installations of software or databases in the desired target platforms.